* Taylor Campbell [2005-09-17 04:47+0200] writes:
Is there more interest in maintaining a well-engineered & -specified protocol for general Lisp interaction, or in producing just an environment for Lisp development in Emacs, regardless of how messy the internals are, and without any provision for reuse & extension in other directions? For instance, the notion of utilizing Swank in the McCLIM tools has been considered, where those tools would serve as a Swank front end, if the protocol were sufficiently general and well- abstracted. (I'm not saying that SLIME should provide this, but rather that it may be a worthwhile direction to consider.)
I for one, am not interested in "general Lisp interaction". Emacs is the only front-end I want to use anyway. I'm however interested in interaction of Emacs with external (possibly non-lisp) interpreters/debuggers. Most of the talk about using SLIME for other things I have heard has not been more than that: talk. And I think it would be a bit silly to provide for reuse and extension if there's no actual application which uses it.
I see the point about scheme48-mode, but I'm not sure I understand why having `package' as a buffer-local variable is unwise. Can you elaborate on that?
It's pretty common to write things like
(defun foo (package buffer) (with-current-buffer buffer (frob package)))
and this might not do what you think it does when package is a buffer-local variable. Symbols like `package', `module', `buffer', `string', `list' are problematic names for buffer-local variables. Let's reserve them for ordinary local variables.
Still interested?
Maybe.
Would you please make up your mind, Sir? Yes or no?